The present disclosure is directed to a system and method for soil remediation, and more specifically to a system and method for soil remediation and optimization making use of pipelines located in the soil.
Arable land is a diminishing and increasingly precious commodity. The world's population is growing 1.1% annually while quality fertile and tillable land is actually decreasing due to pollution, soil nutrient exhaustion, lack of irrigation, poor cultivation techniques, and the expansion of cities and industrial activity. The world is drawing nearer to the point where its population's food requirements exceed the growing capacity of available land using existing technologies. In many areas, contaminated land may be useless for commercial and/or residential redevelopment, requiring further sacrifice of arable farmland to allow urban expansion. Contaminants from untreated land may eventually leach into water tables or adjacent, uncontaminated land, causing illness in local populations, ecological damage, and other hardships.
Soil contamination is generally treated in at least one of three ways. Bioremediation introduces tailored microorganisms to break down contaminants in the soil. Thermal desorption involves heating soil in a rotating dryer to remove or separate contaminants from the soil. Chemical fixation mixes contaminated material with other earthen material, then binds the contaminants in the mixture with chemical additives.
Each of these treatments has flaws. Bioremediation must be adapted to the contaminants and is only effective if microorganisms capable of breaking down the specific contaminants are available. Thermal desorption and chemical fixation require manual removal of a large volume of soil and can be too expensive or complex for developing nations or small farms. These remediation technologies do not take into account the need to enrich the soil and provide irrigation after processing.
A solution is needed that not only optimizes the use of existing arable land available but further cleanses, enriches, and reclaims non-arable land appropriately while putting back into the identified land the required nutrients and organic substances needed to promote environmental regrowth or the production of healthy, contaminant-free foods.